Ceausescu, come back - you'realmost forgiven

Alexandra is the face of Romania's communist Christmas Past. For two years the elderly Bucharest woman has tended the most visited grave in the country - that of Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator whose Christmas Day killing 10 years ago ended the country's revolution and heralded democracy.

A daily stream of visitors place flowers and candles at his final resting place. Alexandra, 73, tidies up after them, unpaid.

'All the people who come say the same thing,' says Alexandra, fussing around. 'They think it was wrong, what was done to him.'

Ten years ago, cheering crowds filled the streets when state television showed live pictures of the bloated face of the executed dictator.

Now millions of ordinary Romanians feel lost and abandoned by 10 years of democracy, and many flock to the graveside. Like Alexandra, they live in the past. 'Things were better then,' says a woman who was a communist bureaucrat. 'There was no crime. Now you cannot walk the streets. You had nothing to fear from the secret police if you had nothing to hide.'

The irony is compounded by the grave itself: a stone Orthodox cross. Alive, Ceausescu despised religion and had more than 20 Bucharest churches torn down to make way for his white marble People's Palace.

Alexandra, who lives on a £20 a month pension, adds: 'Then we had what we needed to eat. Now we don't have anything.'

My young interpreter scowls, inserting into her translation her own memories of six-hour queues to buy milk, and of the feared Securitate secret police.

The answer to the paradox presented by the two women probably lies in the growing desperation of the many millions left behind by a reform process that has benefited only a wealthy few.

Chubby restaurateur Dr Theodor Olteanu is the face of the country's Christmas Present. A former dentist, he fled Ceausescu's communist regime, one of the harshest of the former Soviet bloc, but was lured back in 1992 by the promise of a new start.

He set up La Premiera, one of the capital's most opulent restaurants. Three years ago this month, he celebrated when voters finally ditched the administration of former communist Ion Iliescu, electing instead the centre-right administration of Emil Constantinescu.

But with the third Prime Minister in as many years, Mugur Isarescu, appointed last week amid political turmoil and with Iliescu now ahead in the polls, Olteanu now wants to leave.

'The reforms have stopped. We don't have the money to heat the city's apartments. It is a national scandal,' he says. 'The government can get away with this because they know that Romanians will put up with these things. But they should be in the streets,' he says.

With the national wage stuck at £60 a head, few can afford the prices of La Premiera. 'The most difficult problem is that in Romania we don't have an alternative,' says Olteanu. 'Putting Iliescu back in is no alternative. His people created these problems.'

He plans to join Romania's brain drain - the emigration of skilled people to the West, which has denuded Romanian hospitals, universities, theatres and banks of the people most needed to improve things.

'It seems I have an opening now in Washington DC,' he says. 'I love this country, but I think I will go.'

But some Romanians, such as Rodica Guja, 25, personal assistant to the American regional head of Coca-Cola, see a future at home. Under communism, the law graduate would have been shunted into work not of her choosing. 'This job is a chance I wouldn't have got,' she says.

'There has been progress - freedom to talk, freedom to move. These are things not to be taken for granted. But the revolution has brought bad things, too: too many poor people, too many problems.'

For her, Romania's future will come from the West. 'I want to stay because this is my home. Companies like Coke are training people. The more that come here, the more Romanians can learn. It is our best hope.'